The Sad Finale For Firetide (Unicam Acquires)

I think we are going to see a number of these 'old' surveillance startups exit this year unceremoniously. The market overall is slower, and the interest in investing in companies that have failed to deliver for so long is low.

Isn't this essentially what happened with Fluidmesh as well? They were bought up by another multi-faced IT centric holding company.

I always had difficulty with Firetide sales. We brought them in on a large project where they would have helped design a small WWAN to cover a large hotel and about 4 surrounding city blocks. Even getting a sales person out there required repeated calls and escalation. Clearly, they were overtaxed from the beginning.

I'm glad we never got into them. I remember first reading about them on the way to my first ISC West when I first started in security. They looked interesting because unlike other wireless companies saying they were good for video networks, they actually provided performance and hypothetical numbers. But the pricing was astronomical; we could trench and entire parking lot for what they wanted for their access points.

That's unfortunate. I always had a great experience working with them from a support and design assistance stance, but they were perpetually understaffed. Their employees were pulling very long hours with constant travel, and to see it end like this is sad.

John! Tell me, is the subtitle pun intended? "End of an error"? Is there something else you'd like to say...?

I just heard about KBC as a wireless company

If anyone is interested in enterprise grade mesh networks I would recommend some of the dominate players in that space (Ruckus, Aruba, Cisco, Cisco/Meraki, Motorola, Aerohive, etc...) Plenty of options out there depending on the solution you are looking for. As with many products you get what you pay for so in my personal opinion if wireless is needed I would avoid the cheapest solution.

Update: Firetide's leadership / management page has been deleted (here's the cached version). It was replaced with a tribute profile of Unicom's CEO.

I am not sure where Firetide's exciting management team has gone, but this is not a bullish sign for them.

Guys, this is Cosimo Malesci, Fluidmesh co-founder and VP Sales and Marketing. I have been following some of the conversations here on IPVM regarding the Firetide acquisition and the wireless CCTV market and wanted to share my two cents on the topic. I think there are some interesting insights on entrepreneurship and innovation in the security market that can be drawn from what happened.

I want to start by saying that Firetide has always been a good competitor for us over the years and we have definitely learned a lot from them (and hopefully they have learned a few things from us). Mostly we feel we have helped each other out by creating awareness about wireless in the video surveillance marketplace. Although we don’t know if and how things are going to change for them in the post-acquisition phase, we wish them a bright future and a lot of success.

I believe that to fully understand the reasoning behind what happened, we need to go back to 2001 when Firetide started. At that time mesh was the ‘hot’ technology in wireless mostly due to the muni-wi-fi bubble. As a consequence, many mesh companies managed to raise a lot of VC money. When the muni-wifi bubble bursted, the mesh companies that survived tried to pivot by landing in different markets: some landed in the video surveillance space, others in the smart-grid space, etc. As John has already highlighted, the wireless video surveillance market is fairly small which makes it extremely challenging to deliver the returns that a VC expects. This is where a lot of the troubles begun and you know how things evolved from there.

As some of you are concerned with the future of Fluidmesh and questioning if companies like us will be able to survive given the small and ever evolving nature of the wireless cctv space, I will share with you our story hoping to clear some of the confusions. We started Fluidmesh in 2005 as MIT students and since day one we decided to focus on wireless solutions for video surveillance. The muni-wifi bubble had just burst and we had a feeling the market we were going after was substantially less than $1B. We decided to play it safe and bootstrap the company instead of seeking VC money. The fact that we had a limited initial investment allowed us to turn the company profitable in quite a short time and we have managed to keep it that way since then. We were free to grow the business as much as we felt reasonable and now, looking back, this was the best decision we ever took. In 2011 Fluidmesh become a portfolio company of two private equity firms in Chicago. We wanted to have wider shoulders, leverage the experience of professional investors, and start some additional technology developments. Still we, as founders, kept a significant portion of the company and we are still running the business. It has been a good move and we feel it has allowed us to step things up a notch. Given how we are structured, the size of the market is large enough for us to be succesful and profitable. Because of this, we will continue innovating to find new ways to deliver better and more cost effective solutions to the market. We see a pretty bright future ahead of us.

We feel that wireless backhauling will be playing an increasingly important role in physical security in the coming years and we are very excited to be part of this ‘wireless revolution’. With video surveillance becoming wide spread and security cameras becoming more affordable, the need for wireless is greater than ever. We welcome these new challenges on a daily basis as they will give many wireless companies the opportunity to innovate, grow, and deliver better solutions to the marketplace.

Cosimo